The Night Ornette Coleman Played for Me in His Apartment

Six years ago I watched Ornette Coleman do his thing, in his home, from but a few feet away. It's something I'll never forget.

In the late summer of 2009, as he was preparing for a show at Jazz at Lincoln Center, I went by Ornette Coleman's apartment to talk about jazz, life, and Texas, and how "rhythm is an individual idea that becomes a sound." And God, because to Coleman, everything was everything. He spoke in collages and wide arcing loops and backward and sideways, occasionally speaking a sentence that sounded like a sentence—which didn't really come as a surprise from the creator of free jazz. But to follow his thinking—this man who had liberated himself from meter, measure, clef, and chorus, in every way, and done for music what Pollock did for painting, and what a wrecking ball does for a musty old building—made for an afternoon that I'll never forget.

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Talking to Coleman was like trying to unzip fog, and the experience made me feel like upending something in my life, like mixing things up. As the talking was coming to an end, I was thinking about his "Change of the Century," my first Ornette Coleman record, and one of the greatest records—jazz or otherwise. I asked him if among his work there was one thing that stood out, one thing that he thought of as most important, most fun, most memorable. And in his delicate voice, Coleman said, "Yes, and I'm on the edge of writing it right now." And then he played a little something, with his son Denardo on drums. My tape recorder kept running: